Remembering Lambda Delt
In her excellent tribute to a beloved spiritual mentor, Laurie N. DiPadova-Stocks fails to mention the vital role played by the Church co-ed fraternity, Lambda Delta Sigma, in the 40’s and 50’s, which Lowell Bennion founded. As an appendage to the University of Utah’s Institute of Religion led by Bennion and his fabulous colleagues (T. Edgar Lyon, George Boyd, Marion D. Hanks, and others), Lamda Delta Sigma afforded social experiences and opportunities to serve that surpassed those of even the elitist Greek clubs that many of us could not afford or that would have passed us over—and offered memorable spiritual enforcement as well. I’ve always contended that the combination —Institute and Lambda Delt—saved literally thousands of young LDS students from faltering in their faith over the then-so prominent science vs. religion controversy, among others.
I realize that Professor DiPadova-Stocks’s privileged association with Bennion came later and that she therefore could not know that as rumors first arose at the Institute regarding his forthcoming summary dismissal, some of his students did indeed come to his defense: “Didn’t your students protest?” DiPadova-Stocks wonders in her article. For the record, as Lambda Delt’s U of U interchapter president, I was mission-bound at that very time (spring of 1955). I and several others did charge my newly elected successor to draw up a petition in Bennion’s behalf. Sadly, no one appears to have followed through, though there was, for sure, a groundswell of sentiment for him. I regret we did not do more.
Thomas F. Rogers
Layton, Utah
A Keeper
Your latest issue (159) is a keeper! Robert Rees’s article on Glenn Beck ought to be the last word on “The Real Glenn Beck.” It is penetrating, all-encompassing, and far-reaching—all delivered with Bob’s signature compassion.
Laurie DiPadova-Stocks’s article on Lowell Bennion is helping to keep his legacy alive—so badly needed in our uncivil society. While I was writing Bennion’s biography, Laurie was a great help to me in understanding his use of Max Weber’s sociology.
Linda Sillitoe was a valued friend, beginning when Dialogue published her unforgettable poem, “Song of Creation,” on my watch. She later acted as an interviewer for my Bennion biography. I tried to keep up with her many successes, and I loved going to lunch with her and John. I look forward to her posthumous books!
Mary Bradford
Leesburg, Virginia
Point for Point
Robert A. Rees’s “Rough Stone Roaring” (Sunstone June 2010) routinely presents incomplete information and misidentifies or doesn’t identify where Beck’s critics stand politically. I’m also disappointed that Rees quoted Beck himself so little.
Rees notes that the late Senator Robert Byrd declared Beck a member of the political fringe. Byrd was a former Exalted Cyclops in the Ku Klux Klan who filibustered the Civil Rights Act for days, which makes me wonder if he was the best person to make the case that Beck is a political extremist. Byrd later renounced his actions and obviously repented and received “redemption” from his fellow Democrats, but only after he had been a senator for a considerable time. A more realistic and purposeful comparison may be to say that Byrd and Beck have at least one thing in common—a belief in redemption.
Rees’s accusation that Beck smears Vicks Vapo-Rub under his eyes to stimulate crying is misleading. The YouTube footage Rees cites is from a photo shoot in which Beck is clearly hamming it up. In context, Beck is clearly not trying to manipulate anybody but is mocking his on-camera emotionalism.
Rees makes much of Beck’s oft-quoted comment that Obama is a racist, ignoring the fact that Beck has since apologized for that remark. Beck has gone out of his way to laud the civil rights movement; he regularly has black participants and audiences on his show who demonstrate their affinity for him.
As for the McCarthyism charges, perhaps there is a point to be made, but Rees’s support is pretty thin. As far as I can ascertain, one of Rees’s sources, Bill Press, isn’t a Los Angeles Times writer, as Rees asserts, but a liberal talk radio host whose writing is sometimes published in the Times. Bill Press is a partisan of the highest order. If you hear him calling Glenn Beck a McCarthyite, your first thought should be, “Is it Tuesday already?” If Rees is going to quote such a partisan writer, he should identify him as such.
Later Rees asserts, “Like Beck, McCarthy ‘condemned people as communists perhaps without submitting a shred of evidence,” citing only Van Jones’s case. That’s unfortunate because Van Jones was a self-identified Communist. The following is from his profile in the East Bay Express in his hometown of Oakland:
“I spent the next ten years of my life working with a lot of those people I met in jail, trying to be a revolutionary.” In the months that followed, he let go of any lingering thoughts that he might fit in with the status quo. “I was a rowdy nationalist on April 28th, and then the verdicts came down on April 29th,” he said. “By August, I was a Communist.”
To truly criticize Beck for being a McCarthyite, Rees should have cited an example of Beck’s attacking someone who did not identify as a Communist.
Rees also compares Beck to Father Coughlin without acknowledging what a complicated comparison this is. Coughlin began as a big-time Roosevelt supporter; he was invited to FDR’s inauguration and even wrote sycophantic letters to FDR promising to shift his on-air positions to his 40 million listeners if that’s what the President needed. Only much later in FDR’s presidency did Coughlin decide that FDR wasn’t sufficiently socialist. Had Rees heard any of Keith Olbermann’s recent rants about his disillusionment with Obama because he’s not left-wing enough, Rees would know Olbermann is a far better Coughlin comparison than Beck is, who seems to have no trouble criticizing a myriad of things about the Bush presidency.
Rees also attacks Beck’s questioning of Rep. Keith Ellison, America’s “first Muslim congressman.” While I think Beck’s pointed questions to the congressman were inartful, Ellison is notable for his extensive ties to the virulently anti-Semitic Nation of Islam. He was with former Nation of Islam spokesman Khalid Muhammed when Muhammed unleashed a vitriolic rant against gays, Jews, whites, and others.
To Rees’s credit, when I emailed my critique to him, he invited me to appear on a Sunstone panel about Beck, and for that I give him serious praise. Considering the audience and the subject, the panel needed balance for a much more honest discussion.
Kathryn Hemingway
Sunriver, Oregon
Mormon Liberals and Glenn Beck
As a politically conservative Sunstone reader, I struggled through Robert Rees’s article on Glenn Beck that appears in the June 2010 issue. I’ve long considered Dr. Rees an elder statesman of Mormon studies, and he makes some legitimate points, though Democratic commentators have made them numerous times before.
Rees joins the many liberal writers, politicians, and talk show hosts in labeling Beck a “showman propagandist” who makes “absurd comparisons” with “little regard for fact or truth,” while also questioning Beck’s sincerity by asserting he is an ignorant entertainer who uses “sophistry, fear-mongering, and demagoguery” to push his ideological agenda and to build a financial empire. Such accusations are used so often in current political discourse these days they’ve almost lost meaning and certainly add nothing to the Mormon conversation about Beck.
Moreover, “Rough Stone Roaring” shows bias in that at least thirty percent of the footnotes reference far-left websites, authors, or publications, including ten footnotes to the progressive site Media Matters, seven from the liberal blog Huffington Post, and nine to various liberal activists including Bill Press, Bill Moyers, and Jim Wallis. Rees does not identify these as liberal but denominates the conservatives who criticize Beck as such. The result mirrors the partisan mudslinging of cable news shows.
National Democrats have criticized Beck mainly for his staunch opposition to President Obama’s agenda, not for his LDS membership. Rightly so, because there is very little in Beck’s presentation that exudes or indicates Mormonism, though I’ve seen Beck quote without attribution the two Mormon scriptural phrases, “the natural man is an enemy of God” and “men are that they might have joy.” Alan Rex Mitchell’s article entitled “Meet Elder Beck” in the same issue of Sunstone does enumerate thirteen ways Beck advocates Mormonism; but none of the points listed is unique to Mormonism, reflecting rather traditional Christian beliefs and views that Beck’s national audience likely holds. I do not believe Beck uses dog-whistle tactics to subliminally appeal to LDS Church members.
When I have watched Beck (I’ve never listed to his radio program), I’ve noticed he scrupulously avoids discussing Mormon history or overtly using Mormon themes that would be offensive to evangelicals and members of other Christian churches. (Beck talks on-air twenty hours a week, so on occasion, indiscreet flecks of his LDS religious beliefs have slipped through.) Also, Beck has invited prominent evangelical ministers to be guests on his show, including some who’ve been previously affiliated in the past with sectarian groups that have disparaged Mormonism, among them Pat Robertson, Al Sharpton, and James Dobson. Beck’s ecumenical and traditional platforms resemble those of conservative radio talk show host Shawn Hannity, a radio host and fellow pundit at Fox News. Hannity has no affiliation with the LDS Church, but after he spoke at then Utah Valley State College in Orem, Utah, during the 2004 election campaign, he was asked by an audience member “When are you going to take the [LDS] missionary discussions?”
As a convert to Mormonism, it appears to me Beck is not steeped in Mormon culture. He did not immediately support Mitt Romney’s 2008 presidential campaign like the majority of LDS members did, instead preferring Rudy Giuliani. Beck eventually came around to Romney after Rudy’s candidacy flailed, but only then because of his disdain for the other leading GOP contenders, John McCain and Mike Huckabee. Possibly not aware of Beck’s hesitancy to support Romney, Rees argues that if Romney runs for president in 2012, he might need Beck’s support to win the Mormon vote. Yet without Beck’s help in 2008, Romney garnered huge contributions from Mormons and 90% of the Utah primary vote. Further, as Alan Rex Mitchell notes, Beck frequently uses mild curses on the air, which could certainly prevent many orthodox Mormons from becoming Beck followers. Lastly, Beck has stated his opinion that gay marriage is not a threat to America—a position in direct opposition to his church and the majority of LDS members.
Rees takes pains to quote many Mormon critics of Beck, arguing that Beck has “latched on to some of the worst ideas from the Mormon fringe to shape his political and social agenda.” But Rees does not explain why these so-called Mormon fringe ideas, advanced prominently by Cleon Skousen more than thirty years ago, have catapulted Beck to fame and fortune, while Skousen’s political ideas remain on the LDS fringes.
Interestingly, neither Rees nor any of the Mormon critics he quotes has felt it necessary to publicly repudiate Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada on Mormon grounds when he has used intemperate language such as:
• Calling President Bush a “loser” while Reid spoke to high school students.
• Refusing to apologize on national TV after Reid called President Bush a “liar.”
• Asserting that unemployed men “tend to become [domestically] abusive.”
• Stereotyping Italian-Americans by comparing Italian Senator Rick Santorum to the former mob boss John Gotti.
• Stereotyping Hispanics by stating, “I don’t know how anyone of Hispanic heritage could be a Republican.”
• Having his spokesman blast former NFL quarterback and current Democratic congressman Heath Shuler for throwing “twice as many interceptions than touchdowns” and having a “rock-bottom 54.3 lifetime [NFL] passer rating,” in response to Schuler’s criticism that Reid was not managing the Senate in a bi-partisan way.
• Describing President Obama as a “light-skinned” African-American “with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.”
• Comparing opponents of Obama’s healthcare reform to historical opponents of women’s suffrage and the civil rights movement.
• Calling African American Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas an “embarrassment” who produces “poorly written” legal opinions resembling an “8th grade dissertation.”
Perhaps Sunstone should publish a Harry Reid cover story criticizing the senator’s use of disrespectful language and his troubling pattern of racial gaffes. Reid, also a convert to Mormonism, wields greater political authority than Beck does, and will historically prove to be a more influential Mormon.
Rees, using section 134 of the Doctrine and Covenants, condemns Beck for criticizing President Obama—even positing the possibility that Beck’s “fear mongering” rhetoric might lead to “violence against the President.” Rees has not only been silent about the potential outcome of Reid’s vituperative language against President Bush but also about how fringe elements of Mormonism have influenced the senator’s boorish behavior. However, if Rees or anyone else were to attack Reid on Mormon grounds the same way Beck has been assailed, it would be equally offensive and misplaced.
Another fallacious assumption implicit in Rees’s anti-Beck Mormon sources is that he is extraordinarily popular in Utah when compared with other parts of the United States. I know of no empirical evidence that supports this claim. Data on cable news ratings is available nationally, and it defies credibility that Beck’s audience is higher per capita in Utah than in other regions in America with similar political demographics. From personal experience, I can say that Beck is very popular where I live in Texas. Back in 2009, when he held a taxday tea-party rally at the Alamo in San Antonio, an estimated 20,000 people attended. Beck’s popularity outside of Utah is also supported by New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, who described Beck as an “ecumenical outreach coordinator” after Beck’s successful, non-partisan “Restoring Honor” rally held in Washington DC on 28 August of this year. It also strains credibility to assume that the majority of the people attending that rally, estimated between two hundred and five hundred thousand, were members of the LDS Church.
When Glenn Beck is rebuked publicly by Church members on Mormon grounds, it cheapens public discourse within the LDS community by setting up a Mormon straw man. Furthermore, this obsession with Beck leaves the impression that he has become a stalking horse against whom left-of-center Church members can vent against in response to belonging to a mostly conservative church. At a time of stark political division in our country and within segments of the Church, Rees’s article on Beck fans the flames of polarization.
Michael Paulos
San Antonio, Texas
Darwin and Brigham
Robert Rees’s article about Glenn Beck in Sunstone’s June 2010 issue is an excellent critique of Beck’s twisted logic and bewildering conclusions.
In an August episode, Beck taught that Charles Darwin is the father of modern racism and the Holocaust. As evidence, Beck cited several of Darwin’s statements about the physical and intellectual differences between the white man and the “savages or people of color.” Beck suggested that the theory of natural selection justifies racism because Darwin produced a handful of statements that, in retrospect, seem racist. Beck ignores Darwin’s abolitionist sentiments as so well documented in Darwin’s Sacred Cause: How a Hatred of Slavery Shaped Darwin’s Views on Human Evolution by Adrian Desmond & James Moore. While aboard the Beagle, Darwin wrote to his sister, “I have watched how steadily the general feeling, as shown at elections, has been rising against Slavery. What a proud thing for England, if she is the first European nation which utterly abolish[es] it.”
The same year (1859) Darwin published the Origin of Species, Brigham Young spoke of “some classes of the human family that are black, uncouth, un-comely, disagreeable and low in their habits, wild, and seemingly deprived of nearly all the blessings of the intelligence that is generally bestowed upon mankind.” Brother Brigham went on to declare that upon such people “the Lord put a mark upon him, which is the flat nose and black skin . . . that they should be the ‘servant of servants;’ and they will be, until that curse is removed; and the Abolitionists cannot help it, nor in the least alter that decree” (JD, Vol. 7, p. 290). Using Beck’s twisted logic, we could also accuse Brother Brigham of contributing to racism and the Holocaust. But being an active LDS Church member, Beck would certainly take offense.
Jonathon Marshall
Ogden, Utah
